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How WIRED lost $100,000 in Bitcoin (wired.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Back in 2013, the halcyon days of at-home Bitcoin mining, staffers in the WIRED San Francisco office turned on one of Butterfly Labs' mining machines and let it whir away, amassing a horde of 13 bitcoins -- now worth $100,000. But today we have nothing to show for our efforts. What happened to our loot?
The same thing that has happened to millions of other unfortunate miners, actually: We lost our private key, a 64-digit string of random numbers that not one of us remembers. And we've got basically no chance of recovering it: "Originally I was going to say that the closest metaphor I have is that we dropped a car key somewhere in the Atlantic," says Stefan Antonowicz, WIRED's then-head of engineering. "But I think it's closer for me to say we dropped the key somewhere between here and the Alpha Centauri."
The same thing that has happened to millions of other unfortunate miners, actually: We lost our private key, a 64-digit string of random numbers that not one of us remembers. And we've got basically no chance of recovering it: "Originally I was going to say that the closest metaphor I have is that we dropped a car key somewhere in the Atlantic," says Stefan Antonowicz, WIRED's then-head of engineering. "But I think it's closer for me to say we dropped the key somewhere between here and the Alpha Centauri."
Its not so much about how they lost a bitcoin its more about how they purposefully destroyed it!
I mean I can put a stack of $100 bills in the fireplace too and they will also be 'gone forever' as far as I am concerned personally. Its not like I can phone of the fed and ask them to print me some new ones.
Frankly the people at Wired are stupid, most journalists these days are, so no surprise there. I don't see why they could not have solved the conflict problem by selling the bitcoin for cash - so the value is not independant of the bitcoin, donating the money to their favorite charity before running the store about the mini miner thing they reviewed. Should have been and easy and obvious solution. Then you just conclude the story with "and we got a bitcoin which we sold for X at Mt. Gox (or wherever) the proceeds were donated to xyz foundation for the arts and orphans." No problems or conflicts there. XYZ is unaffected by and change in btc value because they got cash. Selling the coin on the currency exchange was an arms length transaction thru a broker, so again no real problems there in terms of conflict. It was totally unnecessary to destroy their private key.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The linked article actually says they deliberately destroyed the key - to keep their journalistic integrity in the future.
What a pity there's no such thing as integrity on Slashdot these days. The editors have stopped reading even their own articles.
No sig today...
"We lost our key"
isn't the same as (from TFA):
"..."We talked about donating it to a journalism institution, or setting it aside as a scholarship. But we decided that if we gained any benefit from it at all, it would color our future coverage of bitcoin," says Calore. "So we just destroyed the key, knowing full well that it could eventually be worth six or seven figures." McMillan then posted a story announcing the key had been ripped to pieces."
So they didn't LOSE the key, they deliberately and with forethought and recognition of the consequences, destroyed the key.
This is a rather stupid article; essentially it's about how a bunch of people pursued a course of action that...had pretty nearly exactly the result they expected.
Slow news day, Wired?
-Styopa